Jean Giraudoux Quotes

There is no sinner like a young saint.

To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

The first step towards vice is to shroud innocent actions in mystery, and whoever likes to conceal something sooner or later has reason to conceal it.

It is difficult to live with the pure. They do not condemn you; they forgive you. This forgiveness is more terrible than a judgment.

The people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they're the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.

People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us... It's people who claim that they're good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.

He always had a problem with the purity of others. Never his own.

There's no one so self-righteous as someone policing someone else's morality.

How wicked, my brothers, innocent milk must always seem to me now.

One must not let oneself be misled: they say 'Judge not!' but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.

Nothing could be more absurd than moral lessons at such a moment! Oh, self-satisfied people: with what proud self-satisfaction such babblers are ready to utter their pronouncements! If they only knew to what degree I myself understand all the loathsomeness of my present condition, they wouldn't have the heart to teach me.

I will not say it is not Christian to make beads of others faults, and tell them over every day; I say it is infernal. If you want to know how the Devil feels, you do know, if you are such an one.

Moral self-infatuation has its own corruptions, after all. With time, almost every other principle of the magazine acquired an ironic echo, a sort of cackling aftermath.

It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.

Doubtless the world is wicked enough; but it will not be improved by the extension of a spirit which self-righteously sees more to reform outside of itself than in itself.

Loud indignation against vice often stands for virtue in the eyes of bigots.

Let it stand, therefore, as an indubitable truth, which no engines can shake, that the mind of man is so entirely alienated from the righteousness of God that he cannot conceive, desire, or design any thing but what is wicked, distorted, foul, impure, and iniquitous; that his heart is so thoroughly envenomed by sin that it can breathe out nothing but corruption and rottenness; that if some men occasionally make a show of goodness, their mind is ever interwoven with hypocrisy and deceit, their soul inwardly bound with the fetters of wickedness.

The person who understands the evil in his own heart is the only person who is useful, fruitful, and solid in his beliefs and obedience. Others only delude themselves and thus upset families, churches, and all other relationships. In their self-pride and judgment of others, they show great inconsistency.

He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one.

O what fine thought we had because we thought that the worst rogues and rascals had died out.

Self-righteousness is unavoidable. You can either be a self-righteous Pharisee where you think you are better than everyone else or you can be a self-righteous pagan who thinks you are better than the Pharisee. If you are a self-righteous person, I could become very self-righteous thinking that you're self-righteous and you think you're so good but I know you're bad. I know I'm bad so that makes me better than you.

Men are almost always cruel in their neighbors' faults; and make others' overthrow the badge of their own ill-masked virtue.

We are never more self-righteous than when giving up what we should have shunned all along.

Cheap thrill: moral outrage revels in its own innocence and in the guilt of the wicked Others.